CYBER-SURFING:
the State-of-the-Art in Client Server Browsing and Navigation

Abstract

Modern network technology has spawned an entirely new cybernetic
experience: cyberspace surfing. This surfing is as much a social
experience as an information gathering resource. While providing
the communication infrastructure for an ever-increasing
percentage of the
global population, it is also becoming the focal point of an
identifiable sub-culture of cybernauts who are attracted to the
Internet as moths to
light. There is every indication that the forthcoming cyberspace
revolution will have an even more dramatic impact on society than
themicrocomputer revolution.
In this paper we analyze the cyber-surfing experience from the
point of view of the supportive client-server technologies
involved. On the basis
of this analysis and some emerging trends we speculate on the
future of cyberspace.

Introduction

The term cyberspace was coined by science fiction author William
Gibson in his 1984 book, Neuromancer [5]. In that work
cyberspace was
associated with negative images: urban decay, avarice, the use of
information for control. However, cyberspace has now come to
take on a
more positive connotation - a mass noun for progressive
networking technology. Cyberspace denotes a giant information
cloud unified through
today's digital networks. It is a doubly-Einsteinian universe of
information. Not only is it ever-expanding, finite and
unbounded, the first
Einsteinian twist, but it is also relativistic. What cyberspace
is depends upon one's point of view and the tools that one has to
experience it:
to a cybernaut with an ancient Gopher client, cyberspace may
appear dull and lifeless where for Webbers armed with MPEG
viewers and WAV
players the experience can be a multimedia awakening.

In any event, when cyberspace comes to life it does so through
virtual windows on workstations supported with client-server
technology. The
genesis of this virtual world was a technology that appears
modest by modern standards: Telnet. Along with Email and ftp,
Telnet was an early
Internet killer application. What made Telnet distinctive was
the fact that Telnet gave us inter-connectivity, the sine qua non
of cyberspace.
Telnet was not just a remote login procedure in a timesharing
system. It was an inter-connectivity tool for every client and
every server (in
principle at least) on the Internet. The viability of this one
general-purpose, pervasive program paved the way for all client-
server technology
to follow. It was an early milestone in the evolution of
cyberspace.

What followed is miraculous even by modern computer industry
standards. From 1983 when Arpanet went "public" to the present,
the Internet
has grown to 25 million users on 2 million computer systems using
10 thousand subnets [6]. Monthly growth rates are estimated to
be in the
double digits. The usage statistics depicted in Figure 1 are
typical for modern network information centers.

The Internet Toolbox

Internet client-server resources are difficult to classify
because they are motivated by very different interests. We'll
illustrate this with two
examples.

First, consider the case of Internet "white pages." These
resources (Whois, X.500, Knowbot Information Systems (KIS),
Netfind, etc.) are
directory services for the Internet itself. However, even within
that small group there are large differences. Whois is a
centralized directory
based upon the Unix Finger program. X.500 is a decentralized
directory. KIS isn't really a directory service at all, but is a
directory service
locator. That is, KIS uses existing directories to find Internet
users. Netfind is yet an entirely different animal. It doesn't
limit its domain to
network directory facilities like Whois and X.500. It will scour
the net for Internet users on individual servers.

Second, let's consider the case of Emailers. There are scores of
Email systems with widely varying capabilities and vastly
different levels of
sophistication. Some, like Elm, betray a 1970's human factors
orientation. Others, like cc:mail and LaMail are modeled after
today's word
processors. Some mix the old with the new. Pine, for example,
has an interface that is clumsy and stiff by modern standards.
But it allows
the Emailer to attach multimedia files to the message - forward
thinking even for the 1990's. Like the net directory services,
they span the
spectrum of that which is possible and desirable.

Figure 1. The usage statistics for modern network information centers.
So taxonomies of Internet resources should be considered in
perpetual motion. Internet resources for the future will be a
pot pourri of all things
imaginable. That's one of the reasons why people refer to the
Internet as anarchy that works.

We offer the following categorization (see Figure 2) as one of
many perspectives on current Internet client-server resources.

ENVIRONMENT: The generic Internet environment is client-
server/distributed database. There are, depending upon one's
point of view, around
a half-dozen environments, the most central of which is Telnet
[code: t] because it allows a user to connect to the local
clients of the other
environments. FTP (file transfer protocol) is the oldest
environment that dates to the 1970's. WAIS [w] is the earliest
client-server browsing
environment for documents, followed in time and sophistication by
Gopher [g] and World Wide Web [w3]. Add to that dozens of
Emailers
[m] each with proprietary client-server protocols, and the waters
become murky. What is more, each environment is undergoing
continuous
revision and many resources operate over a multitude of
environments, so useful comparisons have a limited shelf life.

FUNCTIONALITY: On our account, there are six basic categories of
Internet resources. Transfer programs [t] facilitate the
transfer of files.
Directory programs [d] are the Internet's 'phone books. Locators
[l] ferret out information on the net. Organizers [o] attempt to
virtually
organize network resources for a particular user in much the same
way that a database schema does. Communications programs [c]
deal with
message transmission - for brevity, we focus only on
interpersonal communication here. Next, we have the client-
server browsers [b]. If
Internet is the backbone of cyberspace, the browsers are its
blood supply. Browsers open the Internet to the virtual
consumption of information
- text, graphics, sound, video. This information is right at
your fingertips irrespective of it's physical location or source.
Finally, we have the
remote login software, Telnet [t], let's us take advantage of
most of these resources even without the client-side software on
our workstation.

DOMAINS: The resource domain describes the nature of the
material with which it works. Directory systems [d] work with
internal network
information like names of users and domains. Document domains
[d], files-oriented systems [f] and message passing domains [m]
are
self-explanatory. General purpose [gp] resources support all
of the above, and multimedia as well.

TOPOLOGY: This is the layout of the network as perceived by the
user and his computer. Although more fine-grained distinctions
are possible,
we choose to distinguish only between point-to-point [p] and
Network [n] topologies. PTP may be thought of as a direct link
to some Internet
resource - two objects linked by fiber, as it were. Network
topologies may be viewed as graphs. One may 'virtually' move
through the net via
strands of interconnected nodes. Cyberspace requires a network
topology.

HYPERLINK: Whether the data is linked non-linearly with both
document-document and document-server links.

MULTIMEDIA: For a first pass, we distinguish between text and
multi-media support. On our view, multi-media includes sound and
video.

Given our concern for simplicity, our classification scheme let's
things fall through the cracks. Internet Talk Radio is a new
form of digital
mass communication - the Internet radio station as it were. The
audio tracks of the program are digitized and stored at an
Internet ftp site for
downloading and playback at your workstation. This facility
really falls within the rubric of mass communication via
cyberspace which is not
covered in this article.

The same holds true for the new wave of audio/visual offerings.
These programs fall into four basic groups: teleconferencing
software,
whiteboard software that supports interactive document creation,
audio/video annotation software that adds sight and sound to
basic
text/graphics transmissions, and algorithmic animation and
visualization that is kind of an upscale Telnet. While presently
LAN creatures, these
programs will soon be client-server offerings on the net. Their
importance derives from the fact that they add human interaction
to the virtual
terminal.

Finally, there is MUD? Multi-User Dungeons were originally
network game programs. Now they have interactive educational
programs
bearing the MUD look-and-feel. The MUD region of cyberspace is a
nebulous one.

Surfing on the Web

Besides the transmission volume, Figure 1 also revealed a
significant change in environment preference over the past few
years. Increasingly,
the World Wide Web, or simply the Web, is becoming the surfers'
vehicle of choice for trips through cyberspace. Since this trend
is likely to
continue for the next few years, we will focus on that aspect of
the cyberspace experience. To be more specific, we will focus on
only
navigation and browsing utilities within that domain.

While Figure 2 reveals some variations between client-server
programs, it is not complete. As any cutting-edge Web surfer
will confirm, within
each category there are products with significant differences.
Webbers will confirm that such clients differ significantly
between each other
in terms of functionality. Clients in one family will have a
very different look-and-feel from those in another, even when
written for the same
environment. There is as much variety within the family of
Mosaics as there is between families.

The point is that even when one looks only at one environment,
there is little orthodoxy when it comes to software design and
engineering.
The closest thing to a standard that we have is Mosaic. Even
there the variation within products is noteworthy.

To illustrate, consider the functionality of a sample of current
Web navigator/browsers (Figure 3). While the general structure
of the display
page is predictable due to the html compliance required by Web,
major differences remain. In the Netscape Mosaic, for example,
the search
engine is integrated with the navigator/browser - a non-trivial
undertaking and well ahead of its peers in this area. Win
Tapestry supports a
hierarchical hotlist folder organization, unmatched by the other
products. Since hotlists and bookmarks don't scale well, this is
an also an
important feature for the serious user as is the ability to edit,
import and export hotlists and bookmark files to foreign
products. Web Explorer
on the other hand has a well-developed cyberlog or itinerary
history, and like Air Mosaic has a full-screen or kiosk option
that is important
in presentations to minimize the distractions produced by the workstations'
background desktop. In short, all have advantages and
shortcomings when it comes
to features which serious users would consider to be important.
These are obvious from even an incomplete overview such as that
in Figure 3.

Predictions

Predictions must always be taken cum grano salis, and those that
follow are no exception. However, we think that by observing
cyber-surfing
behavior and continuously comparing client-server navigation and
browsing aids to peer software resources in other areas,
particularly in the
area of business applications, one can see some fairly clear
patterns emerge. We suggest that client-server navigation and
browsing utilities
of the future will be significantly different that those of today
in the following areas:

reconfigurability - Now reconfigurability, particularly at the
level of the interface, is primitive at best. Within 2-3 years
the successful vendors
will have reconfigurability options that rival today's word
processing systems.

compliance - Current strengths include proxy client support for
the most popular protocols, which is a sine qua non for
penetrating firewalls;
interface protocol compliance for the most popular Internet
environments (Gopher, WAIS, WWW, ftp, etc.); and
telecommunication protocols
(SLIP,PPP,TCP/IP). Most important weakness is in terms of
multimedia support. It is not unusual for WWW clients to hang up
in different
areas of cyberspace even though they claim compatibility with the
same standards.

integration - The successful products of the future will offer
seamless integration to a wide-variety of utilities, most of
which are as yet
undefined. Now the two most important utilities for cyber-
surfing are search engines and external perusers (video and
audio), and in these areas
current products receive low marks. Few clients support robust
native viewers and even fewer include search engines. Successful
products
in this area will be those which are compliance with the broadest
range of third-party perusers since
there is no way to tell which of the incompatible audio and video
file formats will endure. Peruser development will be as random
and
unpredictable as were graphics applications were a decade ago.
The same may be said of search engines as cyberspace spawns
increasing
numbers of spiders, worms and wanderers. Those vendors who focus
on the integration of native utilities rather than compatibility
with
third-party products will lose any competitive edge surely and
quickly.

extensive commercialization of the market - We are already seeing
that. NCSA, the original developer of Mosaic, has already
licensed the
software for commercial development. At least three aggressive
companies are currently marketing NCSA licensed Mosaic progeny
(Netscape,
Spyglass and Air). This trend will continue until nearly all of
the innovation comes from the commercial side.

migration to Windows environment - This controversial claim
follows from the observation above. The numbers tell the story:
marketing to
75 million Windows users has greater potential return that
marketing to 5 million Macintosh users or 2 million Unix users.
While these
approximations may be slightly off, the message comes through
plain and simple: the big bucks are in the Windows market, and
that is where
most vendors will place their capital. Over time more players
will enter the game, which will increase competition and cause
the developers
to become more focussed on the major markets. On our view the
long-term market for Macintosh client-server browsers looks grim.
We
predict that Unix will continue to be the host of choice for much
of the technological innovation, but that these innovations will
be quickly
ported over to Windows or its successor for refinement and
commercialization.

information customization - Finally, we come to that aspect of
cybersurfing which relates to our own research. We believe that
the next 3-5 years
will see a change from an information-provider orientation to
information services to that of the information-consumer.
Information
customization is an important first step in that regard.
Information customization may take many forms from
transformations of information
to the non-prescriptive non-linear traversal of documents, but in
all cases it subscribes to the principle of information
utilitarianism whereby
the value of information is determined by its usability to some
information consumer at some moment in time. For further
information consult
[1],[2],[3].

Conclusion

We are now at the base of the exponential growth curve of
cyberspace evolution. As commerce and industry gets connected,
the range of
services will escalate to bring previously unimagined resources
to the computer literate. Cybersurfing will be a passing fad as
the novelty wears
off and more sophisticated information services are offered.
Cybersurfing will become the cable surfing of the 21st century -
something that
we do when we're too tired or bored to do anything productive.

For the next few years, the greater interest will be with the
hardware and software innovations. This is true with any
technology in its infancy.
As cyberspace technology matures, the interest will gradually
turn away from the technology and toward the content of the
information
conveyed. As a society, we are in the fascination phase of this
technology - much as our grandparents were with their cumbersome
and
unsophisticated crystal radio sets. Quickly, we shall come to
expect perfection from our cyberspace products and will balk at
the prospect of
perusing cybermedia that has not been customized. By the end of
the decade, as the bandwidth and efficiency of the nets increase,
cyberspace
will support a full range of interactive, participatory, three-
dimensional, omni-sensory, virtual experiences. By mid-century
it may be
exceedingly difficult to distinguish between the virtual
experience in cyberspace and its veridical counterpart.

Since Cyberspace is in its infancy and we don't yet depend upon
it for our survival, it can be still be enjoyed. Like a good
cruise, much of the
fun is just going somewhere. Toward that end, you might enjoy
leaving from my dock: url=
http://berghel.net.

Acknowledgements: I wish to thank Ed Deaton and Jim Hightower for
inviting this keynote address. I also express appreciation to PC
AI Magazine for allowing me to include some earlier material of mine
[4].